Samuel Carrington: Otago University dentistry Senior Lecturer on growing waitlist for child dental surgery

Half of the children on the dental surgery waitlist have been waiting for more than four months. 

Health New Zealand data shows nearly three-thousand kids have been waiting for more than 120 days. 

Otago dentistry Senior Lecturer Samuel Carrington tells Ryan Bridge waiting patients have complex issues with their teeth. 

"By the time Tamariki reach hospital care, they're usually in a lot of significant pain and have multiple infected or abscessed teeth," he says. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Over half of children on the dental surgery weight list
have been waiting more than four months. That's three thousand
kids waiting more than one hundred and twenty days health
in zed data. They are apparently in pain, some of them.
There's some complex issues. Samuel Carrington, Faculty of Dentistry at Otago.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
You need good morning, Good morning, Ryan, how are you good?

Speaker 1 (00:16):
Thank you? What are you going to do to get
on the list.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
Right? Well, by the time timebod, if you reach hospital care,
they usually are quite in a lot of significant pain
and have multiple infected or edits teeth. So many of
these so many need several extractions and in some cases
for dental clearances under general So the level of disease
is not about poor oral hygien alone. It's actually about
death issues like poverty and nutrition, lack of early access

(00:41):
to the community oral health service. And if we had
a system that primarily focus on prevention, these children would
be treated much earlier with simpler and less traumatic procedures.
But right now their hospital dentist surgery is often the
end result of a systemic failure.

Speaker 1 (00:53):
So just stop feeding them coca cola.

Speaker 2 (00:57):
Well that's one part of it. But yeah, like I said,
it's a systemic issue. Unfortunately, our community Orehalse service is
under resource, understaff, and this all leads to children waiting
on the list and leading hospital level care.

Speaker 1 (01:11):
So when they're on the list, are they guaranteed to
be in pain? Like for those who are waiting four months,
presumably you would get the extreme cases out of the
way first. So those who are waiting more than form
I mean, are their kids out there literally every day
in pain waiting for a dental surgery more than four months?

Speaker 2 (01:31):
Unfortunately there are And if you think about the weight issues,
so children in pain, you know they can't do things
like concentrate in school, They struggle to eat, they lose
a lot of sleeve. They often go through multiple appointments
to the community Orehalse Service and even to private practices
in order to get antibiotics to kind of alleviate that pain.
But what happens is it affects their development and their
ability to thrive. And it also it's noted impacting the child,

(01:55):
it's also impacting on the family, so that family carries
a huge emotional and financial burden. It's a terrible to
take time off work. Now it's a trope Travelt to appointment.

Speaker 1 (02:03):
It's terrible. Nobody wants that. So what this backlog was
caused by the lockdowns?

Speaker 2 (02:08):
Was it?

Speaker 1 (02:08):
So we locked down then we had couldn't do any
of the surge. Reason then that the backlog we haven't
caught up.

Speaker 2 (02:15):
That's correct, Yeah, okay, but it's also an outcome of
the system itself. So children were being pushed back for
their exams, their dental tickeay got worse, the list got bigger,
and then factor Adam was the fact that we were
having staff shortages. People were leaving, they were retiring. We
were having new graduates graduate from both universities Otago and

(02:38):
aut and a lot of them were going to Australia.

Speaker 1 (02:41):
Are they still going there?

Speaker 2 (02:43):
Absolutely? I also worked at the dental school and I
think about our graduating class last year, I'd say about
a quarter of them went over to Australia.

Speaker 1 (02:50):
What would it normally be, Well.

Speaker 2 (02:53):
The public system actually cries out for a lot of
our graduates. We had around about one hundred and forty
oral health therapist graduate year. But last year it was
the first time in my ten years of looking at
the university that I've seen a big chunk of our
graduates actually go to Australia because they couldn't find jobs here.

Speaker 1 (03:12):
Sam, appreciate your time, Sam Carrington, a senior lecture off
Faculty of Dentistry at the University of Otago. I mean
joined the Q Who Isn't Leaving?

Speaker 2 (03:21):
I suppose?

Speaker 1 (03:22):
For more from early edition with Ryan Bridge.

Speaker 2 (03:24):
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